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Recent Science Fiction. With Women

Two books I read in the last few months had me thinking not just about how science fiction is changing as a genre, but also how we as a society must be making some sort of improvement after all, if even male science fiction writers recognize their fellow geeks who happen to be women to the point of giving them lead roles in their stories.

The Martian by Andy Weir is a gripping survival story set on Mars, where astronaut Mark Watney has been stranded after a sandstorm has forced the rest of his mission to leave the planet without him. Mars, as you know, is a pretty cold and unhospitable place; Watney is there alone, with limited supplies and no communication system, and needs to hack what little he has in order to breathe, eat, and let the rest of the world know he is alive. At times most of the book is taken up with his calculations about oxygen, fuel, caloric intake needs and data transmission rates: math matters, and making a simple mistake could mean the difference between life and death. If you’re into such things as telecom engineering, extraterrestrial botanics, or space archaeology, you will enjoy this a lot.

So, Watney is a man; but the mission commander who decides to ignore higher orders and use her authority to go and rescue him, Melissa Lewis, is a woman. Originally a self-published work, the book was picked up by a publisher and is being adapted into a movie starring Matt Damon as Watney and Jessica Chastain as Lewis. I’ll be first in line for the ticket. (In the meantime, did I tell you how cool Sandra Bullock was in Gravity? no? did you miss it? go watch it).Neal Stephenson‘s Seveneves is more than science fiction – it plots a future for humans in space after a cosmic catastrophe that spells the end of life on Earth. You already know I am a fan of what I call the end-of-civilization genre; I also was a fan of Stephenson’s after reading Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, two brilliant books ahead of their time, but I lost patience with Quicksilver and I found Anathem a bit of a dud. With Seveneves, Stephenson fully returns in my good graces. Other than chronicling rocket launches, the plot does not spend a lot of time spelling out the mayhem that happens on Earth in the two short years between the initial, inexplicable disaster – an explosion of the moon – and the meteorite shower that makes the Earth inhabitable for the next five thousand years, give or take. Most of Stephenson’s action takes place on the safest outpost in those circumstances: the International Space Station, suddenly loaded with as many people as it can drag along with itself in space, as well as with tools, microchips, spare parts for robots, genetic code records, and anything else that can be shipped there to help those humans survive and figure out how to rebuild a self-sustaining civilization. In the early days the commander of the ISS, Ivy Xiao, is a woman, although political maneuvers on Earth quickly replace her with a man; her second-in-command, roboticist Dinah MacQuarie, is another woman. Women’s resilience, strength, and adaptability is indeed key to survival, when everything seems to go wrong and the last few men in the human race, instead of cooperating, focus on killing each other. Two of the bad guys in the story, US President Julia Bliss Flaherty and Italian rebel leader Aida Ferrari, are women, too. The rebuilt civilization will indeed include men; but the descendants of the survivors, five thousand years later, will all be shaped by the personalities and skills of the women who were there at that decisive time. This book is for you if you like orbital mechanics, meteorites, comets, robots, and grand plans for staying away five years but eventually returning home.